The Introduction situates the main theoretical framework and contextualises the book amid the institutional landscape of modern-day Germany. It analyses the productive albeit difficult relationship between anthropology and theatre, as well as the crucial intersections and failures to connect ethnography as a method and contemporary performance studies. The introduction outlines the role of theatre as a modern form of self-cultivation in Germany and introduces the book’s key concept of theatre as a scalar ethico-aesthetic tradition. It discusses the unique scope of anthropology to study both micro-level practices of institutionalised traditions, as well as to grasp wider cultural and historic patterns that have shaped the national traditions of German public theatre. The introduction also outlines the ethnographic accounts through which this book unfolds how such an anthropological study of contemporary German theatre renders intelligible the tensions and troubles of a self-proclaimed ‘state of the arts’.

Chapter 1 unfolds the historical context of two central overarching notions in this book’s narrative: the German Kulturstaat and the country’s Bildungsbürgertum. Combining historical analysis with ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin during the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Germany’s largest theatre festival and observations at the city’s iconic Volksbühne, this chapter explores the moral significance attributed to institutionalised public theatres, as well as activist contestations of its state patronage and institutional structures. It also traces the role of cultural politics in facilitating the emergence of public theatres as sites for aesthetic self-cultivation (Bildung) and nation-building in the face of an increasingly diverse contemporary Germany. Expanding on the notion of institutions as traditions in Western contexts, it expands on the necessity for anthropology to take into account cultural history and art history as part of fieldwork.

Summary: In an accepted view, living standards stagnated in India from about 1600 to 1950. Discussing the history of development in South India from pre-colonial times to 1900, this chapter suggests that development trajectories differed by region and ecology. Naturally irrigated areas commercialised early, traded globally and saw an increase in transfers of capital and goods after 1800. Arid areas were buffer zones, housing large military garrisons in the pre-colonial period. Farmers settled in these areas late, and these regions remained poorly developed during colonial rule. Despite investments in railway networks connecting markets across ecological zones, poor land quality remained a persistent barrier to development in large parts of South India.

The chapter examines everyday citizenship among youth respondents from the angle of their relationship to the state or as citizenship-from-above. Youth respondents initially defined citizenship in terms of legal obligations to the state. Afrobarometer findings that indicate high levels of support for obeying the law and paying taxes echo those responses, though respondents provide nuance to the Afrobarometer data. Legalistic views of citizenship are closely connected to the building and maintenance of strong relations at the local level and, for some, notions of morality. Few youth defined citizenship primarily in terms of voting, though Afrobarometer findings indicate large percentages do participate in elections. Even fewer youth respondents described citizenship as engagement in activities such as joining with others to advocate or protesting to hold governments accountable, a finding that aligns with the survey data. For these few youth, it is their everyday relationships with friends and neighbors and communal experiences of marginalization that motivate actions. Protest examples from South Africa and Uganda show that citizenship-from-above and citizenship-from-below blur and that everyday citizenship manifests in creative and agentic ways.

This chapter looks at the distribution of epichoric alphabets across the whole Aegean Basin, to the different styles of letter shapes used for writing the Greek language according to city of origin. The whole distribution is considered, and in comparing this to models used in previous generations the case is made that the situation is so complex that it cannot so easily be sketched out on a simple map. In focusing on case studies from sanctuaries and harbours, the long-held view is confirmed that these were places of hyper-connectivity, with communities and individuals competing for status – but that network analysis marks these patterns even more acutely. A wider point about data modelling is also made in this chapter. Depending on how representative one considers the data to be, very different patterns can be drawn (and very different conclusions can be reached).

This chapter begins by synthesising the results of the previous modelling chapters, also considering how far one might go with conclusions in each case, given the limits and quality of the various datasets. Having synthesised these data, the models are tested against two ‘known’ networks, described in ancient literature: the Ionian League and the Kalaureian Amphiktyony. In highlighting the differences between the expected and the actual results, the case is made that literature and historical documents can project a greater degree of unity between communities than might have in reality been expressed or presented for reasons of their own political gain and unity.

This book closes by returning to the problem of the polis, and to considering the extent to which a fresh approach can contribute new thoughts to an old debate. In considering what exactly an ancient city was, its activities are emphasised: the fact that a city formed political and economic connection with its neighbours helped to define it. The potentials and pitfalls of modelling for historical enquiry are considered, and the case is made for a more data-driven and ‘scientific’ classical archaeology of the next generation.

The dataset discussed in this chapter is coinage, specifically the first coinage minted in the Aegean Basin. The start of this chapter considers to what extent coinage was first used as either an economic or a political tool, and, therefore, whether any patterns in the dataset will reveal more about political or economic networks. In presenting continuities of the dataset using a network analytical model, this chapter illustrates how the spread of coinage across the Aegean from Ionian innovators is indicative of a pattern in the spread of technology. This pattern is juxtaposed with the distribution of amphoras pattern, indicating that there is a qualitatively similar economic pattern, albeit separated with a large time-lag. This pattern is a useful reminder that different types of economic network laid the foundations for one another, and that material evidence may not always be contemporary with the formation of networks.

This chapter begins by considering the pattern of archaeology in Greece form the past 100 years that has generated huge datasets – and that these datasets have been largely under deployed in making historical conclusions about Greece of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. After reviewing the history of scholarship on ‘Archaic Greece’ (and the relative quietness of scholarship on this topic in the most recent decades) this chapter considers ways in which the huge amount of data from Archaic Greece could be organised and analysed. Various methods from the Digital Humanities are considered, with discussion focusing also on data cleaning and organisation, before proposing that network analysis will be a useful framework for this study in making clear the ways in which the first communities of Archaic Greece formed economic and political alliances – and rivalries – with one another.

Chapter 1 surveys the current historiography of anti-colonial self-determination in the twentieth century. It highlights how historians have continued to view anti-colonial self-determination in terms of state-based political representation.

This chapter shows that political accounts of literature in the first half of the twentieth century are often distinguished by what theorists have called “anti-state phobia,” and thus have occluded productive similarities between the concepts of both “modernism” and “state.” By drawing upon poetry, fiction, drama, and theory by Carlos Bulosan, John Dos Passos, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ezra Pound, and others, the chapter looks at ways in which state practices of domestic and international violence resonate with accounts of personality and impersonality. These accounts include the racially stratified, putative impersonality of states, and the demonstrably systematic attempts to render non-white persons politically invisible, if not extinct. The chapter concludes by calling for critics to reckon with the complexities of state and anti-state practices, as well as the unequal distribution of “personality” along racial lines that has distinguished both the history of the state and the history of modernism.

Chapter 3 considers the making into ‘migrants’ of those who moved and asks what it meant for their kinship relations. It looks at processes of migrant-making through encounters at three different scales: nationally (with the British state), locally (with their neighbours, strangers, and other Christians), and transnationally (with their kin), arguing that migration compressed these two historical generations into one ‘migrant’ generation. At the same time, I show how migrants participated in these processes, particularly vis-à-vis their kin and, in doing so, fuelled the latter’s expectations of economic and other support. Central to the discussion are the ways in which the imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin diverged post-migration, creating friction transnationally. Christianity also features prominently in this chapter, as migrants sought to make sense of their dashed expectations, while seeking means to pursue their aspirations and cultivate a sense of belonging.

This chapter explores the ways in which law and violence were co-ordinates in the pursuit of everyday enemies. Contrary to what we might expect from Europe’s most civilised region, early modern Italy experienced rates of violence that were far higher than its neighbours. The problem was not due to lawlessness. Italy’s highly developed legal systems and bureaucratic mechanisms of state control were widely admired by contemporaries. There was not too little bureaucracy and litigation but rather too much. It remains commonplace to ascribe the early modern Italian problem of violence to a variety of cultural reasons, a hangover from the Middle Ages, a consequence of the climate or the product of so-called ‘Mediterranean’ values. But vendettas were neither inevitable nor interminable. Late medieval cities developed a panoply of judicial and extrajudicial forums for settling disputes and the ideals of police and good government were medieval in origin. This chapter takes a closer look at how the law and legal system shaped vendetta.

Chapter 2 presents the book’s theory of wartime institutional change, which accounts for why civil war is a site of institutional transformation, conceptualizes different wartime institutional logics, and elaborates the causal process through which undermining rules evolve amid conflict. It argues that the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat within civil war unsettles prevailing institutional arrangements and empowers political and military elites who, as the architects of counterinsurgency, possess high levels of decision-making discretion. Under the pretext of combatting the “internal enemy,” this counterinsurgent elite introduces alternative rules of the game, which correspond to its narrow interests. The latter half of the chapter tackles why undermining rules persist within and beyond conflict. Where counterinsurgent leaders can knit together a broader set of interests with a stake in the wartime procedures and successfully co-opt new peacetime political and economic spaces, the undermining rules are more likely to survive. By contrast, shifting postwar elite alignments generate chronic instability, disrupting the institutional status quo.